Derek Williams

Menu

GWeaT New Release

I no longer actively use Google Web Toolkit (GWT), but some affinity remains. I don’t miss experiencing its growing pains from 1.3 to 1.6: maintaining parallel hierarchies of cross-compilable business and transfer objects, forging and tweaking copy and mutation frameworks, debugging generated JavaScript, deployment issues, waiting seemingly forever for Java 5 and 6 support, and so on. But spending trench time in any new technology has a way of fostering interest in seeing it mature.

And mature it has!

After a long stream of GWT updates with relatively small incremental enhancements, GWT 2.0 is a major leap forward, and a game changer. It’s the GWT I’ve always wanted, and one I wish I had at the beginning.

Google has finally taken on the tools side of the equation with their own Eclipse plug-in. Its operation is smooth and seamless: no more cobbled-up mash of third-party plugins, Cypal studio, and gwtCompile Ant tasks.

I’m thrilled to see the death of hosted mode; Google now offers native browser plug-ins for debugging. I used the plug-ins for Firefox (3.5.7) and Chrome (4.0.302.3, dev channel) and debugging was a breeze, albeit sluggish at times. Among other things, this ends the problem of code working one way in hosted mode and another way (or not at all) when deployed to a browser.

The Speed Tracer looks promising for performance monitoring and tuning. However, I could not get past its “no data received in 6 seconds” error. I used the latest dev channel version of Chrome and followed instructions carefully (including the command line switch), but must have missed something. I’ll give this a closer look along with the many other features later.